The Tortured Poets Department is Taylor Swift’s most difficult and least accessible work, a deeply inconsistent collection of 16 bittersweet songs in the soft synth-shade of the bonus ‘vault’-tracks at the tail end of 1989 (Taylor’s Version). It is deeply torn and filled with contradictions, often evident within the same song-framework, leading to a myriad of disappointments and fixations, hype and bafflement. In that, it manages to both sound like so many other Taylor Swift records, but is also like no other one.
